Life without the internet is inevitably relaxed. When the only weather forecast option is a more or less attractive lady on TV who moves clouds and suns on a vague map outline and comments on the whole thing in a foreign language, you just get up in the morning and look out of the window.
Starting point
The Alps lie on the edge of an elongated high-pressure zone over southern Europe in a north-westerly flow. In concrete terms, this means that spring has arrived and has been showing its best side for a few days now. Severe night frost, which keeps the snow fluffy on the north side and above a certain height, is replaced by steel-blue skies and pleasant temperatures during the day. In many places, skiers can still find untracked powder or ring in the firn season.
Outlook
The weather maps show us two lows that are relevant for further developments. One is currently supplying Norway with enviable amounts of powder, while the other is bobbing in the Atlantic off the coast of Portugal and is still gathering its strength for further activities. The Norwegian low would like to move further south to ensure an extremely frosty early spring, but it can't because the Atlantic low is in the way. The latter will continue to strengthen until the weekend and will cause an increasing swell and subsequent southerly flow in the Alps. In many places, the Föhn will be blowing from Saturday onwards, in the north it will remain clear while it rains and snows in the south. Due to the relatively large distance to the low, it remains to be seen how productive it will be, but there should be one or two powder turns in the south from Sunday.
February in review
A brief statistical review of February confirms what we already know, namely that it hardly snowed and was too warm. Austria has not had such a low level of precipitation in February since 1982, with almost all stations not even reaching 50% of the usual amounts. The beginning of the month was very warm across the board. The second half of the month was able to depress the average value somewhat, but the west of Austria still recorded an above-average warm February; in St. Anton the deviation from the long-term average was +3.4°C. We can only hope that March will be better and that winter will make a few more appearances. (Source: ZAMG)
